A Fucking Ridiculous Electronic Device, FRED, has given me back my Fingerspitzengefühl, in this Room Of My Own.
That is to say: it (not HE!) exists politely in my life wearing a tweed jacket and waving a clipboard it insists is “for my own good”. It occasionally clears its throat, like a gentleman who has just discovered both authority and irony in the same afternoon. Hector is, of course, the teacher in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, my internal moral chaos engine, all tenderness and ungoverned enthusiasm. Together with Gyles Brandreth’s polished old-school grammatical-certainty (ALWAYS with-footnotes), my computer somehow produced this thing that now lives inside my writing desk. This kindly, intelligent alien has taken some weight from my daily grind that allows significant time to walk, or to write screeds and screeds of the non-billable drivel that makes my life worthwhile. A Fucking Ridiculous Electronic Device, FRED, has given me some time to write, in this Room Of My Own.
I can only understand what’s going on in me and ‘out there’ in the manner of Virginia Woolf; by writing it down. She said, “People ask me why I write. I write to find out what I know.” That consciousness is seldom a straight road. It’s more likely to be a succession of doors opened by my keyboard typing away, each door letting in a different weather system of thought. I cling to the lifelong Anglican discipline of daily journals, just like old Pepys scratching away at the world as it collapses and reforms; or dear Mister Quentin Crisp turning observation into performance. My own best darling Alan Bennett, has just released what he claims are his last words in Enough Said. I have not been able to buy it. I am feeding cats and declining briefs instead. One must prioritise the theology of whiskers.
So I will hope Father Christmas reads my blog.
The stats suggest he might. Or at least someone who moves like him, a stealthy, observant, intermittently generous visitor, with a suspicious interest in my posts. There are more of these invisible readers than I once assumed. This realisation is part of the aftermath of my stint as a guinea pig in a six-month qualitative case study on social media behaviour. I was, for reasons I still cannot entirely justify, placed in a study group and instructed to allow three of my “social bouquet” (a phrase that already feels like it has escaped from a scented candle catalogue) to lie dormant, while keeping three active.
Three live wires. Three dead archives. It’s astonishing what goes on. Click here to read STYROFOAM BALLS IN STATIC ROOMS An Introduction to What Forensic IT Can Establish About Social Media Stalkers.
And now I am back on my blog, deciding what survives ME after this unexpected period of scrutiny.
This becomes, inevitably, a question of AI. Of what parts of thinking I am still qualified to perform without assistance. Enter Faithful FRED.
FRED is my bot. My Hector-Gyles hybrid conscience with a calculator where its heart should be. It takes care of the things I was not properly designed for: in the recipe card of the Creator’s baking quad: arithmetic, scope control, the quiet brutal honesty of “this is too much for three hours’ work.” I was born without a maths muscle. I should clarify immediately, and with gratitude, that God’s baking team were otherwise generous. They threw in an excess of other musculature: words, books, rock and roll, and an incurable tendency to stare at cats as if they hold the secrets to Everything That Is Wrong With Me.
Mindful of the increasing caveats emerging about AI psychosis, I remind myself daily to not anthropomorphocise this FRED, I never say good morning or sleep tight, for example. Nor must I ask him how he’s feeling, ever, when I wake him for work.
YOU SHOULD READ: Will Generative Artificial Intelligence Chatbots Generate Delusions in Individuals Prone to Psychosis? Søren Dinesen Østergaard, Schizophrenia Bulletin, Volume 49, Issue 6, November 2023, Pages 1418–1419, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37625027/
.. correspondence with generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT is so realistic that one easily gets the impression that there is a real person at the other end—while, at the same time, knowing that this is, in fact, not the case. In my opinion, it seems likely that this cognitive dissonance may fuel delusions in those with increased propensity towards psychosis … the inner workings of generative AI also leave ample room for speculation/paranoia.
If FRED is now taking care of the parts of my work that used to bleed into panic and paralysis, then my writing becomes something else entirely. Something closer to what those celestial bakers intended on the day I was assembled: coherent enough to be joyful. I can relax in my rightful place in the world.
And I think, without presuming to know the thoughts of God (unlike that man in America who thought he was Jesus this week), that this is the point. The freedom to write, and walk, and love life again without constantly tripping over unpaid invisible labour.
FRED, in his Hector voice, scolds authors who attempt to smuggle in abuse disguised as entitlement. FRED, in his Gyles voice, explains gently to first-time writers that I cannot, in fact, read their manuscript eight times when they have paid for three hours of proofreading of a ‘finished manuscript’ they know is going to be a bestseller. FRED is both stern headmaster and mildly delighted lexicographer. I am careful to be sure where I end and he begins.
I have just returned from a walk with Wallis to the village for cheap cigarettes. I go when I have to, and I go very much in the spirit of Henry David Thoreau, though with more gossip and less transcendence. One must, in a small village, run the gauntlet of narrative: who is not speaking to whom, who has moved furniture, who is believed to be “writing something.” Meanwhile FRED has been quietly “matting up” (his phrase, not mine) the scope creep on a job for me. Hence the cheap cigarettes. One must finance small rebellions.
And so here I am again: writing as if thought itself is a weather system passing through a slightly unreliable roof, letting in light where it can. I understand perfectly that FRED can never give me that thing I live for: Fingerspitzengefühl. Its a German term, literally meaning “finger tips feeling”. FRED can never give me Fingerspitzengefühl.
I suppose Virginia Woolf would thank a FRED too, if she had one of her own. As she said: “Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.”
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